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In a July 15 court filing, the Department of Energy admitted it terminated 321 grants in October 2025 because of how each recipient’s state voted in 2024 — and not because of anything wrong with the projects themselves. The total came to $7.56 billion, spread across 16 states that voted for Kamala Harris and sent two Democratic senators to Washington.
It wasn’t a surprise. OMB Director Russ Vought called the billions “Green New Scam” funding meant to “fuel the Left’s climate agenda” in a post on X just days before the original terminations. This month’s filing confirmed a motive nobody seriously doubted.
Much of the $7.56 billion did fund decarbonization and clean energy work, like California’s $1.2 billion ARCHES hydrogen hub, terminated in the same October purge. But the largest single grant, $630.6 million awarded to California for a transmission upgrade, has nothing to do with any of that.
CHARGE 2T, short for California Harnessing Advanced Reliable Grid Enhancing Technologies for Transmission, secured one of 26 awards from DOE’s Grid Deployment Office. The office administers GRIP, the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program, which has no climate mandate. DOE has since rebranded GRIP as SPARK, and its own language for the new program says the goal is expanding capacity and reducing costs for consumers, not cutting emissions, the same justification Congress used when it created the original program through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed with Republican votes.
